2TB drives are just now dropping to parity with 1TB on a $/GB basis. If you want space rather than speed, this is a good option. If you want speed rather than space, more spindles and smaller disks are better. Ironically, 500GB drives now often cost more than 1TB drives (that is $, not $/GB).
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Patrick Angeles <patrickange...@gmail.com>wrote: > We went with 2 x Nehalems, 4 x 1TB drives and 24GB RAM. The ram might be > overkill... but it's DDR3 so you get either 12 or 24GB. Each box has 16 > virtual cores so 12GB might not have been enough. These boxes are around > $4k > each, but can easily outperform any $1K box dollar per dollar (and > performance per watt). > > If you're extremely I/O bound, you can get single-socket configurations > with > the same amount of drive spindles for really cheap (~$2k for single proc, > 8-12GB RAM, 4x1TB drives). > > On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 10:19 AM, stephen mulcahy > <stephen.mulc...@deri.org>wrote: > > > Todd Lipcon wrote: > > > >> Most people building new clusters at this point seem to be leaning > towards > >> dual quad core Nehalem with 4x1TB 7200RPM SATA and at least 8G RAM. > >> > > > > We went with a similar configuration for a recently purchased cluster but > > opted for qual quad core Opterons (Shanghai) rather than Nehalems and > > invested the difference in more memory per node (16GB). Nehalem seem to > > perform very well on some benchmarks but that performance comes at a > > premium. I guess it depends on your planned use of the cluster but in a > lot > > of cases more memory may be better spent, especially if you plan on > running > > things like HBase on the cluster also (which we do). > > > > -stephen > > > > -- > > Stephen Mulcahy, DI2, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, > > NUI Galway, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland > > http://di2.deri.ie http://webstar.deri.ie http://sindice.com > > > -- Ted Dunning, CTO DeepDyve
